SPORTS OF THE TIMES

SPORTS OF THE TIMES; THE VIEW UP CLOSE

By George Vecsey

Published: February 2, 1986

That's what Barry Switzer said on the morning after the Orange Bowl, when some reporters suggested that Penn State had not given much trouble to his Oklahoma football team.

Switzer seemed a trifle perplexed that reporters had no feel for the physical battle that had taken place on the line of scrimmage. When we went to the dressing room at the end of the game, we could see the battered warriors running off the field, dirt and blood and sweat on their uniforms, but until then they had seemed like toy soldiers on a war-games diorama.

Switzer was coming close to one of the secrets of sports journalism, that in most of the major sports -basketball a vital exception - reporters are seated too far away to feel the concussion, to see the spin on the ball.

The reasons are part logistical, part economical, and the result is that nonpaying critics are stowed in mostly comfortable, often soundproofed, booths high in the eaves. My long-range eyesight is excellent, but through the glass at the Orange Bowl, at a night game, it was virtually impossible to have a feel for the Oklahoma-Penn State game without the help of television monitors.

Switzer's comment made me resolve to watch games from other angles, just to change my perspective. I had also been primed by somebody who had bought an expensive ticket to an Islander-Edmonton game this season and who had raved about the power and speed and the pugnacious jaw of Mark Messier, and how fearsome Messier had seemed climbing over the boards to get on the ice.

''It's a whole different game up close,'' my source had said.

This was proven Tuesday night as I accompanied a couple of paying patrons to the good seats right behind the penalty boxes at the Nassau Coliseum for a game with the Toronto Maple Leafs. We arrived during warm-ups, and I was impressed by how young and insecure many of the players seemed.

From up high, one sees mostly the graceful flow of the pregame patterns; the players seem like geese in formation along a flyway, with numbers on their backs. From up close, however, one feels the players' humanity, sees their eyes darting from teammates to opponents to spectators. They licked their lips, smiled nervously, as if to reassure themselves.

Once the game started, the first impression was how hard the puck was to control - not an abstract item, the constant blip in a video game, the way it seems from the press box - but a rolling, turning, flipping, twisting, hooking will-o'-the-wisp, challenging the curved sticks of the players.

And yet the players did control it - adjusting to each flip of the puck, keeping it near the end of their sticks. The Islanders' old-timers worked the home boards wisely, banking passes off the boards, behind opponents, to a spot where an Islander teammate would suddenly materialize.

The shots on goal took on different meaning from the sixth row. They were lethal weapons, hard pieces of rubber soaring at unpredictable tangents. When Billy Smith tried to track down a slap shot with his catching glove, the puck seemed to rise and slice to his left. His hand had to calibrate the double action of the puck - up and away - with no margin for error. It was a very ordinary save, but from our angle it was a piece of work, and the fans applauded.

From this close to the action, it was clear how hard opponents work at throwing Mike Bossy off stride. He seems to take more pokes, more nudges, than other notorious gunners in the league, including the celebrated Mr. Gretzky. However, in one exchange, when a Toronto player wrestled Bossy to the boards near us, we could see Bossy clutching five fingers' worth of Maple Leaf shirt, to make sure his opponent did not sprint away at an advantage.

Another thing you could see near the ice was the psychic closeness of the linemates Bryan Trottier and Bossy, how wired they are to each other's moves. Not only do they pass to each other reflexively, but they back each other up in minor flareups, in arguments with the officials, in discussions with the official scorer. Rarely in sports do you see two teammates coming as close to forming a single unit, Butch and Sundance, as Nos. 19 and 22.

The Islanders have been on a scoring spree, and when they took a 3-0 lead in the second period, against one of the weaker teams in the league, the fans anticipated a romp. So, apparently, did the Islanders, because suddenly there was no wall of defense, no perimeter hitting.

The professionals on the other side moved in, executed, and scored two goals in the space of 24 seconds. As the Islanders changed players, you could hear the angry slam of the door to the bench, thump-thump-thump. The home team immediately asserted itself, and the danger passed.

A word about the fans. This game took place a few hours after the tragedy of the Challenger, and certainly all of us were dampened by that ghastly event, but even under normal circumstances Islander fans are quite loyal and often knowledgeable but suburban-dull to the core. I know Madison Square Garden fans can be vulgar and vicious, but there is also a sense of pizazz that does not extend to the plains of Hempstead.

The Islanders eventually won the game, 9-2, and everybody seemed happy except Greg Gilbert, the red-headed strongboy trying to fight back from a major knee injury. He broke one stick after freezing with a chance to drop a perfect lead pass, and he broke another stick in the penalty box after taking a foolish run at somebody. From up high, his tantrums would have seemed like comic relief, but from this close, his anguish and perhaps concern for his career were all too real.

There will be other games soon enough, and most of them, by necessity, will be observed with the amenities of telephones, statistics, instant replays and the wisdom of colleagues. But Barry Switzer was right: the real game is down on the floor, where nothing bounces cleanly, and where physical contact can hurt.